How to drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram

In this new Infobunny article we show you some really simple tips to help you drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram.

So let’s get started!

How to drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram

Reddit is not exactly the platform that most marketers proactively advocate.

However, a marketer worth his/her salt would know that it is indeed one of the most promising platforms for driving traffic to your website.

A recent statistic revealed that Reddit now has 330 million users.

What is remarkable is that Reddit (a play on “I read it/read it”) enjoys a high engagement-rate as the bounce rate is barely 25%.

Quite impressive, isn’t it?

Instagram too has come to represent the new age retail marketing and hipster culture.

While Reddit is all about the old-school forums and even has the interface of the early social media age, Instagram is the new age platform for young marketers, influencers, and bloggers with a potential worth exploiting.

Search Marketers usually restrict their social media marketing and referral traffic efforts to the major players like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

These platforms boast of a more business to business, “serious” audience.

However, in this post, we will be looking at how you can drive maximum traffic to your blog or website through Reddit and Instagram.

Work that Reddit magic!

Before we get to the how-tos, it is extremely important that you understand the basics of Reddit.

Reddit is notorious for its ruthless users who often participate heavily in almost maniacal arguments that often serve as the source of humour for the rest of the internet.

You may not have the appetite for Reddit’s madness but it is sure worth your time.

Here is how you can drive traffic with Reddit

Reddit is home to more than 1 million thriving communities so there is plenty of choices to find the community that best suits your websites, content/niche.

Reddit is a great social platform that you can use for driving traffic to your blog but you will still have to create or curate your content so you can use something to garner momentum on the platform and eventually direct it to the blog.

But before you begin actively trying to drive traffic with Reddit, you first must get familiar with the territory.

Like I mentioned above, Reddit has plenty of communities so once you set up your account, look for the right communities (subreddits) and subscribe to get updates about relevant posts.

Once you have subscribed, do the following:

Participate and engage to drive traffic with Reddit

Once you have joined the relevant subreddits, look for the conversation that’s happening at the moment and participate without trying to market your services or products.

While plenty of social media platforms are all for advertising and proactively use the advertisement model for revenue, Reddit is all about keeping the platform free of unsolicited marketing pitches.

So, begin your Reddit journey with participation.

The only way of engaging other people is by offering relevant engagement to the platform itself.

Moreover, keep in mind that Reddit is big on blocking or suspending posts and accounts that explicitly or indirectly spam or don’t follow the rules.

So, don’t just make your account and begin posting about your blog links or services pages.

You can begin exploring the subreddits by checking the top tab in the menu list.

The top tab lists the type of content that’s specific to the subreddit you have chosen so exploring these will get you an idea of what type of content the community invites and appreciates.

If you begin posting your business links right away, there is a strong chance that you will be down-voted heavily by the Redditors.

Initially, try to get maximum upvotes on your submission and become an esteemed member of subreddit community.

Get niche specific

As you begin engaging, you will start observing how successful Redditors are driving traffic to their blogs on Reddit.

Some may be directly linking to their website and some may be doing it anonymously.

You just need to explore the arena enough to understand what kind of posts are finding success on the platform and which ones aren’t.

Many Redditors are afraid of highlighting their links but this often results in less traffic as the viewers aren’t able to identify them.

Often, new Redditors end up making irrelevant submissions or post content on the wrong communities.

Wear a Disguise

Redditors are pro’s at identifying spam accounts and you may think that you are really just promoting your blog but in the eyes Redditors, it’s plain spam and a total sin.

So, consider making an account in a name that doesn’t shout out your brand or business name right away!

The practice is famous on other portals. Facebook lets you make a business page but Reddit is quite hard on brands that focus primarily on spamming with uninvited marketing.

Once you become a thriving and reputed member of the subreddit, people will enjoy your links but initially, if you are new, make sure that you avoid using your business name as your username.

Self-promotion has never been a big hit with Reddit but if you want to tread down the territory, be careful.

Valuable content is everything

Even on Reddit, the easiest way of engaging people and grabbing attention is by offering value.

If you make a post that gives no value with just a link to a website, you won’t find takers.

What’s consistent to Reddit communities is that unless you begin creating posts of value for the members, you won’t earn their praise.

If you end up posting trash posts then you might just invite the wrath of the community.

So make sure that start with engaging content.

Up your content marketing game and don’t be afraid of curating content especially if it involves humour or non-business elements.

Learn how to grab attention

There are some specific ways of drawing attention to your posts on Reddit such as using capital letters in headings and writing concise with spot-on headlines to express what the link is about clearly.

If you are making a post for a guide, then you can capitalize all or the most important words in the heading.

However, if it’s just discussion or a link post then you can just capitalize the first word and write the rest in a small case.

Another main feature that helps you advance the traffic to your site is tagging on Reddit.

If you are posting a link to your latest Medium blog then you can mention the tag (medium.com) next to the heading.

Reddit has a list of specific rules and guidelines for making better posts which you must absolutely go through.

Now that you understand how to make Reddit work for your website and squeeze traffic out of it, let’s shift our attention to the contemporary hipster playground, Instagram.

Drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram – Here is how you can drive traffic with Instagram

Link in Bio

You might have noticed that opposed to Twitter and Facebook, Instagram doesn’t let you post clickable links in captions or anywhere else except the bio.

If your URL is too long, make sure that you shorten it using a tool like tiny URL and keep track of the clickthrough rate.

Moreover, there are plenty of tools available online that let you put all of your stories together and give them an individual link.

These tools will further make a link for this display page where your viewers will get plenty of choices to find out about the story that they are interested in exploring.

The benefit is that this will let you post more links and direct referral traffic to different pages of your website.

These tools work especially great for news publications websites.

The image, as well as the caption, should both fulfil the purpose of sending your viewer to the bio link.

Figure out new and interesting forms of content to engage your viewers such as contests or polls, etc.

Influencers

Instagram gave birth to a whole new breed of marketers and brand strategists called Influencers.

They do exactly what the name says, influence the market opinion and sway the customer’s decision.

You can always tap into their followers and get more people to visit your page and click the link in your bio by connecting with them.

Since influencers are trusted for their stories and experiences, they will know how to influence the audience and get them to like your brand.

Influencers post quality content, often in the form of recommendations and reviews and vouch for products and brands indirectly.

They aren’t exactly brand ambassadors but more like buyers turned spokespersons.

So, you can tie up with influencers and get them to vouch for your brand or post engaging content through them to drive more people to not only your Instagram page but also to your website.

Based on your budget, start approaching the influencers and you can always negotiate based on the volume of engagement and visibility they enjoy on the platform.

Actionable Images

Mere actionable captions that evoke emotions aren’t enough on Instagram.

If you really want to drive traffic to your website then start adding a call to action (that indicates the link in bio) or sends the viewer to your website.

Since you can’t really mention a clickable link in the bio, make sure that you mention such text or graphics in your image that drives the audience to read the caption that further drives them to click the link in bio.

The image, as well as the caption, should both fulfil the purpose of sending your viewer to the quite hard.

Figure out new and come to forms of content to engage your viewers such as contests or polls, etc.

Videos

Instagram videos don’t really give you the option of mentioning a clickable link but you can always leverage the value of voiceovers.

You can include the link in your voiceover and make sure that it blends in naturally with the rest of the script.

Moreover, focus on the quality of the video and ensure that you keep your audiences engaged through the content and then only they will pay attention to what you are saying.

Sponsor your content

Sponsoring posts on Instagram means paying some money to get your posts seen more than the unpaid ones.

Instagram doesn’t flood the users’ homepage or feed with paid ads but it sure helps the sponsored posts find more viewers across the platform using smart data like the type of posts and hashtags your targeted audience generally use.

For example, if you want your sponsored post/ad with a clickable link to find a wider audience, Instagram will show your ad to people who have already checked out the same kind of content before.

Sponsored posts are not only a commendable way of getting seen widely but also a fantastic way of getting people to click on your link.

Mostly, people don’t click on the profile and visit the bio out of laziness and also because the process often puts them off.

But the sponsored Ad provides the link in the post itself in the form of the call to action.

This way, you will earn more referral traffic and may even drive up your conversion rate if you use the landing page and post content right.

How to drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram – Takeaways

Reddit and Instagram have almost the same number of users as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

The platforms may not be a pro marketer’s go-to choice for driving maximum traffic to the website but one can’t afford to turn a blind eye to these either.

Given that Reddit has retained its popularity among the users since 2005 and the growing reach of Instagram to the hipster generation, it’s time that you begin using these both to attract people to your website.

Both Reddit and Instagram are content driven and while Instagram will let you use sponsored posts to get more people to notice you, Reddit is quite strict and quite hard.

But you can always begin with participating in authentic discussions, earning the position of an esteemed member in the relevant subreddit community and begin posting links.

In fact, you can even use Reddit to distribute your content and begin writing posts exclusively social media.

Hosting AMA (Ask me anything) will also help you promote your business without appearing obnoxious.

The core idea is to get maximum upvotes with engaging and relevant content.

As far as Instagram is concerned, you can use creative ways of getting maximum people to click the link in your bio.

Since Instagram only lets you mention a clickable link or call to action in bio, use your content strategy to get more people to visit your bio or sponsor your posts for higher visibility.

That’s all for now.

Do you use Reddit and Instagram to drive traffic?

How do you drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram?

Do you have any other unique methods we have not covered?

Let me know in the comments section below. 

Make sure that you subscribe to the comments so that you are notified when I reply.

Regards 

Nagendra

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Nagendra Singh

Chief Search Strategist at SEO Corporation

Nagendra Singh, a well-known name in the SEO Industry, is also a Chief Search Strategist at SEO Corporation, the leading Indian Digital Marketing Agency. Other than being a co-founder, he also heads the Search Strategy, Research, and Execution team the agency. Nagendra Singh is dedicated to helping brands grow their web traffic and derive more revenue-oriented benefits out of it through smart SEO.

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• How to drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram - December 14, 2018

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How to drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram

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In this new Infobunny article we show you some really simple tips to help you drive traffic with Reddit and Instagram. So let's get started!

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Nagendra Singh

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Infobunny

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